Messaging Services like Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Message Service (MMS) have been widely deployed today. MMS is a value-adding function service for mobile phones. Compared to SMS, it makes the message transmitted between mobile phones no longer to be merely simple and short text. Rather, the message may incorporate rich multimedia information like text, picture, audio-visual, and voice. The wide application of MMS increasingly demands the provision of personalized and flexible messaging services. The needs for personalization and flexibility are not only required on the recipient side of message, but also gradually required on the sender side. The sender's involvement in the control and manipulation of the sent message on the recipient side is an embodiment of such a personalization. However, the personalization is far from being satisfying in prior art messaging services.
For example, currently the message notification mode is pre-configured at the receiver side. There are some kinds of messaging software (messaging agent) which even allow for pre-configuration of the message notification mode, e.g., special ring tone or volume, corresponding to a particular sender. However, those solutions are static or unchangeable to the sender, and thus not flexible to meet the sender's requirements. For example, suppose a sender wants to send an urgent message to a target mobile phone. At that time, the notification mode of the target mobile phone may have been pre-configured as “silent” by the messaging receiver. In order to notify the receiver with the good effect, the sender wants to override whatever original notification mode on the mobile phone with a loud ring tone mode. But current mechanisms do not support this function.
The static nature and inflexibility of the current way of configuring the message notification mode for mobile phones is also reflected in that the receiver can only select a notification mode from the notification modes existing in his/her mobile phone. The receiver can at most expand the existent notification modes by downloading ring tones. However, the receiver's mobile phone allows for neither sender designated ring tones, nor sending particular ring tones to the receiver's mobile phone. For the message sender, there is a lack of the option for sending messages to the targeted receiver in a personalized way.
Therefore, there exists such a need that the message sender can instantly change, in an end-to end way, the notification mode in which a target mobile phone receives his/her messages.
In the aspect of managing messages by the receiver, the existing messaging services does not provide personalized service flexible enough so that managing received message on the receiver side involves the senders. For example, currently, messages received on the mobile phone are saved in the message inbox. There is not a mechanism for the receiver mobile phone to automatically delete some of the messages from the inbox, which is sometimes undesirable for the sender. For example, the sender may want to limit the time duration a sent message will be saved in the inbox. The sender may want to restrict the number of times a sent message shall be read by deleting the message once the number is reached. Therefore, there exists a need for sender-controllable archiving of messages.
Moreover, the receiver of a message in reply to an original message is usually assumed to be the sender of the original message. In some cases, the sender of the original message may desire that a third party is the receiver of the message in reply to the original message. For example, One sending a message on behalf of another person may desire that replies to the message will be directly sent to the another person. Moreover, the receiver may forward a message after receiving it. Sometimes, a sender perhaps may expect the receiver to forward the received message only to a particular group of people. However, the existing messaging services does not provide the functions of selectively restricting, by the sender of a message, the target to which the message may be forwarded or the expected receiver of the reply to the message.